Coaching Leaders and Organizations
to Their Preferred Future

I coach leaders and organizations to identify, pursue, and achieve their vision and goals. Together, we identify options to discover personal, professional, and organizational dreams and needs, discern alternatives for improvement in behaviors and actions, design the appropriate next steps, and implement a course of action. My most frequent engagements include board development, strategic planning, succession planning, one-on-one coaching at the senior level, and facilitation of collaborative initiatives.

My experience covers thirty years at a senior level with leaders in business and non-profit organizations. I have always had a coaching style, supporting others through professional and personal development to better performance. My style is to build others up through relational coaching, focusing on the pivotal issues and questions that will help chart their future course. I then suggest processes and options to enable growth and decision-making, always encouraging teamwork to integrate many parts into an optimum whole. A network of expert partners works with me to engage large or particularly complex initiatives.

Different coaching contexts call for different approaches. Many business people desire assistance in the role of architect or directive engineer to obtain quantifiable and immediate results. Many non-profit organizations and donors desire the nurture of a gardener, drawing all stakeholders toward a deeper engagement in the mission and vision of their organization, generating strength from connecting and reconnecting people. Each board requires a unique combination of hard and soft skills as it focuses on two "bottom lines" - profitability and the transformation of human lives. Faith-based organizations focus on both bottom lines within their sense of calling and obedience. I have experience in all of these contexts.

Local, national and international for-profit and non-profit organizations, through coached leaders and boards, have accelerated their efforts in such areas as financial services and wealth management, manufacturing, literature distribution, child sponsorships, real estate sales, hospice, theater, crisis pregnancy assistance, world relief and micro-enterprise development, and inter-cultural education programs. An adaptive coaching style has enabled me to participate in such initiatives as a multi-million dollar library consortium project, a twelve-bank R&D center creating collaborative bank services, a hundred-college commission on the integration of technology into private education, a multi-national values-based leadership development center, and a thirty-one campus consortium to implement collaborative purchasing programs.

Following several years in banking, I moved to Taylor University, where I served as the Vice President for Planning, Strategic Initiatives and Technology. Three components combine to create my present trajectory. I have always been a coach at heart. In each assignment, "blooming where you are planted" was the inspiration for innovation that eventually received recognition at a national level. Trained in systems, my career started in the hard skills of data and systems management, evolved into the softer skills to lead new initiatives of people and projects, and has matured to focus on the wisdom of leadership.

Through significant relationships and appropriate processes, leaders and organizations can gracefully move to their preferred future. I desire to be a part of that transformation.